by Mary Gordon
“All?”
“Me and some of the lads I work with politically. Finbar and his friends.”
“What politics are we talking about?”
“Well, the group we identify with is known as the Real IRA. The group opposed to the treaty. I’m sure you know better than to believe what the media says, we all learned that during Vietnam, and it’s particularly true of this group. Not that we’re really involved that closely. We’re really more anarchist revolutionary ourselves. But we don’t want to see the commitment of centuries, the poetry of history, generations of sacrifice and honor, a long tradition of resistance to colonialism thrown down the drain for consumer greed. There’s got to be more to life than money.”
“Nobody believes there’s nothing to life but money. They call it other things. Security. Quality of life.”
“Yeah, well I’m against it. Down with quality of life,” he says, raising the espresso pot over his head. “At least in the sixties, we knew there was more to happiness than consumer goods. A lot of us put a lot on the line for that.”
She follows the line of his arm as it travels, admires the corduroy of his well-cut shirt. She can’t imagine his putting anything on the line for anything. He is prosperous, healthy, well fed. A hero to a bunch of wannabes, one of whom was her daughter’s lover.
She thinks of Ya-Katey, her daughter’s father. Her lover once. She thinks of Billy Ogilvie, jailed because of her father. She thinks of her father. She will not allow this buffoon to include her in any category he might consider himself part of.
“The sixties weren’t the same for everyone. They involved a lot of irreparable loss. It wasn’t one big love-in.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve come to believe that history as it’s given to us is a tragedy, and it’s up to us to turn it into a comedy. That’s what I try to do with my politics and with my work in theater.”
“What happened to your son wasn’t comic.”
“What happened to my son was very sad. But it was just an accident. I think it knocked Pearl off her center. Of course with the Omagh bombing, she started to get a bit unbalanced, I think, really fell for the whole media deal hook, line, and sinker, stopped thinking for herself, in my opinion. She bought the media’s interpretation that it was a terrorist act. Not understanding that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, one man’s violence is another man’s liberation. Or woman, for that matter. And that in revolution there are always tragic errors.”
“In this case the tragic errors resulted in dead children. A dead child is not an error. She refuses to deal with life and death as an abstraction. That’s why she’s done what she’s done.”
“I know, the personal is political—particularly for young women, I’ve found. I have two of my own, and God knows I find them hard enough to understand. They’re in their mid-twenties, but sometimes I think their understanding of things is very adolescent. I’ve read they’re changing the definition of adolescence to include twenty-five-year-olds now. Stevie, my son Stevie—well, his death got all mixed up for your daughter with politics and her eating issues, which is a big thing for young women these days. My Caitlin went through a little bulimia phase in high school.”
“My daughter does not have an eating issue. She was experiencing despair about the nature of the world, she wanted to mark a tragic death, she wanted to bear witness to a larger tragedy, a public one. She wasn’t worried that she was fat. It had nothing to do with how she looks.”
“But let’s face it. The stage she played everything out on is the stage of her own body. It’s what I do: theater. I have my own company in Roxbury. A lot of the women are involved with pieces acted out on the stage of their own bodies. I mean, as theater what she did was very potent. Everyone looked, which was obviously the point.”
“She didn’t want people looking at her. She wanted people to listen to what she said. There was nothing theatrical about it. It isn’t a performance. It’s life and death to her: what she believes in seems worth her life. She wants to bear witness.” Maria knows she is using Pearl’s words, not her own, that she is expressing what Pearl believes, not what she herself thinks. But she will not allow this man to misinterpret her daughter so carelessly, so foolishly.
“I can’t support that kind of martyr trip,” Mick says. “Maybe it’s your Catholic background, it makes you more sympathetic.”
Maria feels a band of heat spread across the back of her neck. I think you’ve seen that Maria’s relationship to Catholicism is, to say the least, quite vexed. No one is more critical of the Catholic Church than she; she has left it—unequivocally, she believes—in protest against aspects she considers repressive, heinous even. Yet she hates it when someone feels free to make an assumption about Catholics—especially when she is one of the ones being assumed about—that she considers coarse, clichéd, or overlarge. Is this just a version of defensive tribalism, is the band of heat on the back of the neck just that? Yes and no. Maria would say no, absolutely. I would not be able to entirely agree.
“I’m sure your ignorance of Catholicism and my relationship to it is near absolute,” she says, “but I have no impulse to go into that now.”
“Look, I don’t want to argue with you either. I can imagine you’re feeling incredibly overwrought.”
Like many women, Maria reacts to the word overwrought as if a gauntlet has been thrown down and she must pick it up and perhaps choke the thrower with it. She doesn’t want to spend any more time with this man. But she can’t resist saying something to his accusation that she is overwrought, a word she knows he would never think of using for a man.
“I am not overwrought. Nothing I have said or done justifies that adjective. I am not overwrought simply because I don’t go along with some male version of the world.”
“Don’t gender it, OK?” he says. “I’ll get Finbar. You just sit here and enjoy your coffee.”
She refuses to sit down, refuses to touch her coffee mug. She stands behind her chair, black plastic, easily overturned. She would like to turn it over; she would like to break something, simply to make a point: that she could.
Finbar comes into the living room wearing a terry-cloth robe the color of peanut butter and yellowish suede slippers with fleece cuffs. She’s sure his mother bought those slippers for him, as she is sure his parents are paying for the apartment, which is entirely featureless. Books and papers spill everywhere; full ashtrays and beer cans cover the black plastic coffee table. There are cigarette burns on the tan corduroy couch and chairs. The lettering on the posters is in Irish, so she doesn’t know what anything means, but she imagines they’re proclaiming solidarity with the Republican cause. Pride of place belongs to a poster of a young man in pageboy hair, a dazzling smile. Finally something is legible: the name Bobby Sands.
Finbar must know she and Mick have had words. He’s no abashed, ingratiating, wounded boy now; she’s the enemy, the woman here to ruin male peace.
He hands over a box that’s taped on the top. It’s remarkably heavy; she doesn’t know how she’ll get it down the stairs.
“Here, give me that,” Mick says. “There’s no elevator. I’ll take it outside and we’ll get you a cab.”
“I can manage, thank you,” she says.
“Look, it’s easier for me. Don’t make a battle of it. Save your strength for the real enemy.”
He takes the box out of her arms and is already out the door. She can’t possibly run after him and struggle for the possession of the box. Finbar watches her follow Mick down the stairs; he closes the door before they’re at the bottom.
Mick has gone out without a coat, but he doesn’t seem to notice the raw cold. He carries the box two streets down to a taxi rank and helps the driver put it in the trunk.
“Thank you,” she says, refusing to meet his eye.
“Hey, if you need anything, you know where we are. Day or night. Absolutely,” he says, and cocks his thumb and forefinger at her as if they were a gu
n.
When she gets back to the hotel, the bellboy carries the box into the elevator and then into her room. She unpacks it as if it would provide clues. The clothes in the box are remarkable only in their neutrality: grays, blacks, whites. No nightgowns or pajamas. Pearl and this boy slept naked. A warm red velvet robe, familiar to her: a present from Joseph and Devorah five Christmases ago, worn—overworn—on weekends when Pearl’s not getting dressed till three in the afternoon drove Maria to distraction. Toilet articles; several products—Nivea lotion, under-eye cream—for dry skin. She hadn’t known Pearl suffered from dry skin. Maybe it was only in Ireland. But wasn’t the climate of Ireland wet? A package of condoms. Our generation did not use condoms, she thinks. The new etiquette—my condom or yours—was foreign to us. It was supposed to give women more control, although she couldn’t see how. Her daughter’s condoms. Her daughter’s life with men. Men? Finbar is a boy. What was her daughter doing there? She shudders, thinking of Mick—what was his name, Cabot, Lodge—one of those names. Winthrop. She wishes she’d been with Pearl to help her interpret him. She could have said, at least, It is impossible to act well in a room with a man like that. Impossible to be natural. “Don’t gender it,” he had said—ridiculous use of language; surely Pearl would have seen through that. But seeing through that kind of man didn’t seem to help. You saw through him as if he were transparent, but the transparency didn’t matter; his weight was what mattered. They were heavy, these men; you felt the weight of their bodies on you, pressing you down, making it hard for you to breathe. As if they were fucking you; in a room with them you always felt fucked, fucked by a man who was too heavy on top of you, whom you had to wriggle around to be free of, knowing that if they wanted to they could, with their strong arms, pin you down. You acted trapped, like a wild animal. You did wild things, trapped things. You said, “I can carry that box,” when you really couldn’t, when it was clearly the case that he had more physical strength, could carry it more easily than you, and you ended up following him down the stairs, a fool, a failure, a weakling, a girl. And then your rage flared up, and you wanted to do something wild to show him—to show him what? That kind of man was transparent but impermeable. A wall of glass bricks that could crush you but would never fracture, never even have its surface scratched.
What should she have done in that room with Mick Winthrop? What did Pearl make of him? How did he treat her daughter? Who did he think her daughter was? And how did she act with him? If only she had been there. But Pearl had never mentioned Mick or Finbar, or living with a boy whom she bought condoms for, kept in her toilet kit along with her under-eye cream, moisturizer, nail clippers, deodorant, cake of eyeliner, and thin black-handled brush.
She’s almost afraid to look at the books, as if they might give too much information. Most have to do with language. Irish grammars, books by De Saussure and Chomsky. A collection of Irish fairy tales. And one she recognizes as her own: Butler’s Lives of the Saints. Not her own, her father’s; his signature is on the bookplate. Her father’s study comes to her. Days when she would sit reading on the rug, the delicious smell of paper making her wonder if the books she was reading might themselves be edible.
Pearl must have taken the book from her shelf without asking. Or, no, it wasn’t on her shelf. She must have gotten it from Joseph; Joseph had kept her father’s books.
She won’t think about her father now. Only to wonder what Pearl knows of him. Has Pearl asked Joseph questions about her grandfather? If so, it’s been kept from her. But Maria has never asked to be the custodian of her daughter’s thoughts.
She puts everything back into the box. None of it has made anything clearer. If Pearl were in front of her right now, the first thing she would say to her is, I don’t understand.
40
Pearl opens her eyes, closes them, opens them again. The doctor is gone, but she is not alone. Tom is always with her, or a nurse. There is very little she can do. This interests her, as if it were a situation she was observing in the life of someone else. There are bars at the side of her bed that she can’t lift. She hasn’t the strength, and besides she is attached to poles with tubes; there is a tube in her nose and throat; in her vagina. She has only a vague memory of how they got there, a distant sensation, like a wind rushing, violent, tearing, dark, but without a single image clear enough to explain anything.
The doctor is gone. The doctor has kept her alive. The doctor said her death would be a waste. Didn’t she understand how insulting that was? Like saying someone’s lover was a fool.
Did the idea of death make the doctor angry? Was it anger that gave the doctor the strength to hold her down when she’d put the tube, hard as a pencil, in her throat, the tube she’d pulled out? Had the doctor been impressed by that? Or did it make her angrier; was it anger that made her stitch the tube beside Pearl’s nostril? For the first time in her life, force has been used against her. Odd, she thinks, that force should be used against me, a person of no force. “You have a lot to live for,” the doctor said. The doctor who spoke kindly was the same one who pressed her shoulders down, shoved a tube into her throat, then sewed another to her nose. Pearl feels she must thrash against her. She sees the doctor as a bush with branches that keep growing in front of her, scratching her eyes out, choking her, like in a fairy tale. The bush keeping her from something she has worked to get to, that the doctor thinks she must be kept from, because it is a waste.
She is losing her weakness, a thing she cannot will herself not to lose. It is very odd, she thinks: as she loses weakness, she becomes more afraid; as she is fed, she becomes hungrier. In losing her weakness she has lost something of great value to her. She is giving up her place outside the ring of force. When she was not afraid of death, she was saying that there were things more important than her own life. That seemed an entirely good thing. Now, in fearing death, in no longer desiring it, she is helping to keep the iron ring closed. She no longer breaks the circle. She had cast her lot against all safety measures and all prudence. Her hand became so thin it was translucent if she held it to the light. She raised her thin translucent hand and in this gesture was her exaltation. And in her exaltation she was exultant.
Starved, she was exalted and exultant. But with nourishment, she has grown hungry and she has begun to fear. Starved, she needed nothing. Now she knows her own aloneness. Before, she saw or sensed her companion, waiting for her at the end of the road. Now she can see no companion, only a long darkness, and feels the sense of being unaccompanied.
Fear has entered, now, and taken root. It has taken its time; its time is now. When she tries to tell herself death is desirable, she must work to conjure the face at the end of the white road, and often she is distracted: by a tearing hunger, and by the doctor’s words.
She is frightened; she is hungry; she is confused; she is interested; she must work to see the face at the end of the road.
Her mother is in Dublin now. If she calls for her mother, her mother will come. The doctor has said she will bring her mother to her, if she wants, or keep her away, if that is what she wants. Only a little while ago—but how long? Time has been lost to her—she knew she didn’t want her mother. Now the image of her mother, coming in from the winter with cold on her hair, stirs up in her a hunger, a hunger that is similar to her desire for her mother’s food. Her mother’s mashed potatoes. Her mother’s rice pudding. Her mother’s body, the cold clinging to her hair.
She turns her head to where Tom sits, reading under the bad light. “Tom,” she says, “I’d like to see the doctor.”
“She’s just outside. I’ll get her right away.”
41
Joseph has walked for a second night through streets that seemed desolate rather than dangerous, walked down prosperous streets of houses set far back from the road, houses behind walls or hedges or gates. He has taken buses, got off anywhere, read signs that said Howth, Dun Laoghaire, Chapelizod. He feels the pavement through the thin soles of his shoes; this is an appropri
ate sensation, he thinks, ungiving, punishing, without variation or surprise. Once he stopped for a glass of wine. This he regretted, because it blurred the edges of his fatigue, making him feel he should succumb to it.
And why not? He has a room that has been paid for. He could bathe so that he won’t dread the glimpse of himself in a shop window: grizzled, derelict.
He is waiting for something, an understanding or the lifting of a burden. But his mind won’t focus; all it will do is press again and again on the dull wound of his mistake.
The sun comes up, a joke effect, a whitening, not an illumination: colorless. He tries to remember: if you stare into the sun do you go blind? Not this sun, he thinks, it hasn’t enough power. He rests his gaze on the circle of a more silvery white, concentrates on the whiteness pressed into the whiteness, loses himself in the question: What is the difference between white and white?
White, absence of color, pure color. He thinks of white stone, arches of white stone, a white stone fountain. He thinks of the hateful pinkness in the restaurant two nights before: the pink lamp shades, the pink tablecloth, salt poured to absorb the spilled wine on a pink hill on the flat pink plane of the cloth. He thinks of Maria eating meat and butter. Animal fat. Pure animal. Even an animal has its purity, because no animal is capable of excess. That’s it, he thinks, excess rather than mixture is the opposite of the pure. Maria has always been excessive. His mother was right. What she said was dreadful but it was the truth; Maria is greedy. Greedy for everything: for weather, talk, expression. Most of all sensation. The word sufficient has never crossed her mind.
A pure gesture, he thinks, has no excess. Purity. Impurity. He has suffered because of the ideal of purity; he remembers the shame of being sent away to Portsmouth Priory; the guilty anguish at the strange, perhaps criminal desires of a thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-old boy; his torment in the days when he desired Devorah’s body and knew that any touch would be a violation. He has suffered from the ideal of purity, but he would not have it given up. Without the ideal of purity, too much would never have come to be: Matisse’s empty oval, the face of St. Dominic, holding only air; the arias in the St. Matthew Passion; the credo in the Magnificat that changed Devorah’s life. She was right to change her life for it, wrong only later when she said it wasn’t worth it. What was the it that it wasn’t worth? he wanted to ask her.